March is shaping up to be a sad month for Internet Explorer 6 — at least in terms of its relationship with Google.

Google said earlier this year that on the first of the month it would begin phasing out support for the browser within Google Docs and Google Sites. And lately, visitors who go to YouTube on IE6 have been met with the following messages: “On March 13, we are dropping support for your browser. You’ll still be able to watch videos after that date, but new features may not work properly” or “Your browser will be unsupported soon. Please upgrade to a modern browser.”

The systematic shunning of IE6 will not end there. Ars Technica reported that later in 2010, Google would phase out support for the browser in its mail and calendar applications as well.

Google is recommending that its users update to newer browsers, including its own Chrome, Firefox and later versions of Explorer. And it’s not a difficult recommendation to make for most users: IE6 is more than eight years old — beyond ancient in Internet years. It’s clunky, makes browsing a generally frustrating experience and is a pain for developers to accommodate. But it’s still used by plenty of people — about 20% of those online, according to Netmarketshare. Some of these people just haven’t upgraded for whatever reason. But many businesses use IE6 because at some point they developed internal applications tied to it and are loath to change all of those to update the browser. CNet news reported this week that Intel, of all places, still uses the older version of Explorer.